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Music -
Music Reivews
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Written by By Adam Ziglar
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Album: "Tropism"
Label: Western Vinyl
Listen: Here
Unlike a lot of ambient music, which can comfortably masquerade as background noise during a party, Austin, Texas-based Bexar Bexar's latest effort, "Tropism," does the opposite. The mystery of this album is that the songs, when heard and discerned more closely, become more complex with each listen.
The 10 songs on "Tropism" are vignettes of sound created using simple acoustic guitar plucks and subtle electronics. They evolve in the listener's mind similar to the way a rain starts gently but grows with intensity, rattling more audibly on the windows, tin roofs and car hoods – a complex but easily ignored experience that requires a little focus to discern the difference between rain drops on a metal roof and water trickling down drain pipes.
These songs must have been created with a desire to capture tiny moments and freeze them in time, rather than attempt to trudge through a journey of both lows and highs, of singles and B-sides.
Listening to the album is like reading a book, getting stuck on one particular sentence of brilliant prose and stopping to read and reread the line, allowing it to sink into the ether of your mind. Upon each successive listen, the songs grow in depth, in character.
Not unlike Brian Eno, a composer who created new realms of sonic possibilities through the notion that music can assume the same properties as light or color and blend without detracting one from the other, Bexar Bexar further embodies that standard, combing both acoustic and electronic elements that take on "earthy" features – like rain or a Saturday afternoon drive with the windows rolled down.
Songs such as "Cotton in the Grossness" seem to take simple meandering guitar patterns and couple them with strange, almost word-like electronic glitches and chiming reverse noises, the kind of sounds wind chimes would make if you could manipulate time in forward or reversed directions and at any speed to your liking.
At just over 35 minutes, the distance this album's 10 songs carries you is not as important as how the same scenes seemingly change shape before your very eyes.
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